If you have a FileMaker system and you need to script the processing of adding or removing files on the server, the first problem you are going to come across is: how do I stop the server from a script?

You may already be familiar with the fmsadmin command. This is present on both Mac OS and Windows installs of FileMaker server. You can simply run the following command in Terminal to stop the server:

fmsadmin stop server

The difficulty is that this command normally expects a live user to key in some information to complete the command. In particular, a password must be supplied.

How do we stop the server from a script then?

fmsadmin -uYourAccount -pYourPassword -y -t300 stop server

Here we have supplied the user name and password, plus the -y option to answer that yes, we really want to stop the server, and -t to allow users up to 5 minutes to log off the database files.

Somewhat incongruously, to restart the server when done you simply use:

fmsadmin start server

No user or password is required.

Other Methods

On the Mac OS, if your script is running as root, you could’ve also used launchctl to stop the server:

launchctl stop com.filemaker.fms

The main downside to this is that you can’t specify a grace period to disconnect users. Also, if your script isn’t currently running as root, you’d have to use the sudo command to make command execute as root, and the expect command to supply a password to sudo.

For Windows, you do something similar to launchctl on OSX to stop the FileMaker database service:

net stop "FileMaker Server 8"

Kill Command

On OSX, you will almost never want to use the kill or killall command on the fmserverd process. If you do, the launchd daemon will almost immediately restart the server process. If for some you do need to use this command, perhaps because a server is not responding normally, perform in this order for best results:

sudo launchctl stop com.filemaker.fms
sudo killall fmserver_helperd
sudo killall fmserverd

Even more dangerous is to use kill -9, which is likely to cause any open files to be corrupted. If you must force quite the server, first disable or disconnect the network connection on the server, wait at least a minute, and only then force quite the fmserverd process. This should reduce the chances of your database being corrupted.

FileMaker 11 is here! Are you ready for the next generation of the world’s most widely used, easy-to-use database?

As Platinum members of the FileMaker Business Alliance and long-term beta testers with FileMaker, we’ve been testing the new version of FileMaker for a while now and wanted to share some of what we’ve learned.

We’re extremely pleased to report that FileMaker 11 makes some core improvements for the user experience and these are what we’re going to focus on in this article. There’s a bunch of under-the-hood improvements that developers benefit from, but for now, we’ll focus on improvements for users.

There are many cases where FileMaker's scripting isn't always the best tool for the job and where a language like Ruby can bring a lot of power to your FileMaker development. The following is a description of a simple technique for using ruby scripts from within a FileMaker solution without the use of a plugin. I've found this technique useful for employing regular expressions for complex text parsing, making web requests to work with web APIs, and for parsing and generating XML and other serialized data structures. Ruby has a wealth of great libraries for doing anything you can imagine and is just plain fun to write.

The Problem

Most FileMaker Server setups on OSX that I have seen are using the default permissions as set by the FMS installer. When viewed in the Terminal, they look like this:

drwxrwxr-x  11 fmserver  fmsadmin   374 Jul 16 12:54 Databases

These permissions say that the fmsserver user and the fmsadmin group both have read, write, and execute permissions to the folder and it’s contents. So far, so good. But who's getting those read and execute permissions? Why, EVERYONE does! Although there can easily be exceptions depending on a server’s configuration, it's likely this means that any user with shell/SSH, SFTP, ARD (Apple Remote Desktop), or VNC access will have read access to all your live database files and their backups.

This issue also pops up if you copy a new database file into your database directory. An all too common mistake is to forget to set the file so that either the fmserver account or the fmsadmin group has write access to it. With the Upload feature now found in FMS 9 Admin console this is not as big a problem as it used to be, but there are still occasions where its desirable to copy a file directly to the database folder.

The Solution

So, how do we fix this? My solution is two-fold. First, for any account that should have direct access to the database files I fire up the Terminal and do the following:

sudo dscl . append /Groups/fmsadmin GroupMembership theaccountname

This will make the user’s account a member of the fmsadmin group. Even if you do nothing else, this will give the user both read & write access the the database folders and their files.

Next, we need to modify the permissions to the folder containing the database files. The default location for this is:

/Library/FileMakerServer/Data/Databases

sudo chmod o-rx /Library/FileMakerServer/Data/Databases

We have now removed the ability of anyone who isn’t fmserver or in the fmsadmin group to read the contents of the Databases folder. Next, and this is perhaps the trickiest part, we us an ACL based permission to allow the fmsadmin group full access to the Databases folder, overriding the previous POSIX style permissions. Additionally, it causes all enclosed files and subdirectories to also inherit the same permissions. The somewhat lengthy command looks like this:

sudo chmod -R +a 'fmsadmin allow list,add_file,search,add_subdirectory,delete_child,readattr,writeattr,readsecurity,directory_inherit,file_inherit' '/Library/FileMaker Server/Data/Databases'

If logged in as a user in the fmsadmin group you should now be able to copy over new files or create directories in your Databases folder and have them pick up the correct permissions for FMS to read and write to the file. If you want to check this, just be sure to use the -e option with the ls command, otherwise the ACL’s won’t be displayed.

A new version of our free FileMaker plug-in is now available. You can download the latest version at http://www.beezwax.net/download/bbox

This version sports the following improvements:

• bBox_AppleScript now uses UTF-16 (2 byte characters) where possible
• bBox_DoShell has improved handling of UTF-8 characters, faster processing of large amount of text
• bBox_PasteboardGet has improved handling of encoding issues, and a new UTF-16 mode
• bBox_DoScript function can now pass a text parameter to the script being called

FMCakeMix is now an open source tool offered by Beezwax to the development community. Please see the project page for further information and access to source code.

Developing FileMaker applications for the web can be a sometimes slow and arduous process. The available custom web publishing tools from FileMaker and open source offerings such as FX.php are very helpful in bringing basic data and interactivity to a FileMaker driven page or form, but their structure leads to poor code maintainability and repetitive code writing practices for larger and highly customized web projects. In recent years web application frameworks have become the tool of choice for rapidly developing robust browser-based applications. These tools provide the structure for good code keeping practices and already include code for common tasks such as the basic CRUD (create, read, update, and delete) operations required to work with a database. The common architecture followed by most frameworks separates the data-source and data access from presentational code by way of an application logic component. This type of architecture is known as MVC (Model-View-Controller) and the frameworks that support it will often also support a large number of common database sources, including MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, etc. Unfortunately FileMaker is never among these offerings and is not natively supported in an MVC framework.

Today we are making bBox, our toolbox of external functions for FileMaker, freely available to all FileMaker developers. Use it to extend the reach of your FileMaker solutions to resources outside of FileMaker by launching and communicating with other programs, utilizing the powerful commands built-in to Mac OS X, and easily creating, processing, and managing files.

Passing values between FileMaker and AppleScript can be a pain. Sure, you can use a named field and table in FileMaker to do this, but if you (or someone else) ever changes either of the names your AppleScript routine breaks. So, even though its not the most efficient way to do things, for short routines I often prefer to use FIleMaker’s ability to run a "Calculated AppleScript" (i.e., compile and run a script from a calculated text).

Other than efficiency, one problem with this approach is that you need to convert data into an AppleScript expression. This custom function makes it a simple task to pass a values list from FileMaker to an AppleScript subroutine:

I’ve been doing work on a couple projects integrating Rails with FMP over HTTP. There are a few different FMP features and plugins the FMP developers use to connect to Rails, none of which I truly grok. Notwithstanding my lack of FMP knowledge, I wanted to write-up what I expect from FMP as an HTTP client, and what I think would be neat to see.

A Good Foundation

When I’m integrating with another system over HTTP, I usually provide usage examples for my Rails-based service using the lingua franca of *nix system tools like Bash, Curl, WGet, LWP, and Telnet. I expect an integrating client like FMP to be able to perform the same basic functions those commandline tools perform.

If you’re working with data from outside of FileMaker, you’ll commonly have to work with dates that FileMaker’s GetAsDate function won’t understand. To handle this, I created a custom function that allows conversion of a wide variety of date formats.

Some examples of how the function works: